


can't start a fire without a spark

by scioscribe



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, Pre-Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:34:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26453440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: I have not forgotten the songs of my junkie boyfriend. A Time Life Collection, only $9.99.
Relationships: Eddie Dean/Roland Deschain
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28
Collections: King of Exchanges 2020





	can't start a fire without a spark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [janie_tangerine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/gifts).



> Slight canon-divergence pre- _The Waste Lands_ , i.e., Susannah's there but she and Eddie aren't together. This story takes place before Jake's reappearance.

The habit started on the beach, and they just never broke it.

_Habit_ , Eddie thought. That was the word for it. He’d traded heroin for Roland, and maybe in Roland’s world that was a hot-shit bargain, but in New York, there were names for guys who needed to cozy up to their buddies to get to sleep at night, and none of those names ever got said without a sneer. Junkie was one thing. Junk _happened_ to you. Queer was another story.

Not that they’d done anything. Yet.

They weren’t screwing. They were just sleeping together. It was like fanning in so much smoke that you couldn’t tell whether or not you had a fire.

Detta had had the time of her life with it, sucking on every word she threw at them like it was hard candy, each of them coming out of her lips with an audible _pop_ of glee. Odetta had politely ignored it until she could—with a slight clearing of her throat—make it clear that she wasn’t thinking less of them for it. Susannah shrugged it off, bringing up the one practical thing Eddie hadn’t thought of: “It keeps you warmer anyway, doesn’t it? And while it’s doing that, it leaves more blankets for me.”

Eddie had a better idea of what she thought of it than he did of what Roland thought. Shit, he had a better idea what she thought than he did of what _he_ thought.

The one thing he knew was that Roland had saved him, that first night on the beach, holding him together while he was falling apart—a shivery, sweaty, desperate wreck, weeping from grief and self-pity.

Then he’d stuck to Roland while Roland was sick, stuck to him like _dad-a-chum_ stuck to _did-a-chick_ , feeling the open-oven-door heat of Roland’s fever baking against his face as he tucked it against the nape of Roland’s neck.

Now it was just the way things were, their sleeping arrangements as settled and regular as the fucking _Waltons_ : good night, John-Boy.

Eddie shifted around. The clump of moss that was serving as tonight’s bedding, Mid-World’s answer to the down-filled pillow, tickled at his cheek. He wasn’t made for this kind of back-to-nature living. He guessed he’d probably slept in dives more bug-ridden than your standard primordial forest—Eddie and Henry’s Dream Palace of Long Nods had sometimes gotten roaches so big they should have been paying rent—but it was one thing to turn on the lights and hear the fuckers scatter and another thing to feel something brush against his ear and wonder if some kind of mite or beetle was trying to crawl up _inside_. Except—except sometimes he thought Roland’s world, like Roland himself, was too pure for that. When it threw horrors at you, they were big and nasty and talked to you before they tore bits of your flesh out. When it threw good at you, it threw Roland: noted Tower junkie and apparent Eddie Dean enthusiast.

Eddie separated himself from the tangle of Roland’s long arms and legs—that Roland was a cuddler, that sleeping with him was like sleeping with an octopus, was something he could never get over. It made his heart hurt a little, how thoroughly Roland embraced him once they were both asleep. It was more, he knew—he _thought_ —than Roland would ever do while they were awake.

_Because he’d still walk over you to get to the Tower. Don’t forget that. Or at least he thinks he would, and let’s not kid ourselves—long, tall, and ugly knows himself a hell of a lot better than_ you _know him._

He walked around the clearing like he was keeping watch, circling around their makeshift little camp—their bed, Suze’s a little ways away, and the glowing embers of what was left of their cookfire.

Eddie tilted his head back, breathing in the crisp, sweetly fragrant air and looking up at the skies—blacker and deeper and starrier than anything he’d seen in his whole life.

Roland could move like a cat when he wanted to, but this time Eddie still heard him: the gentle rubbing swish of Roland’s age-stiffened jeans against the long, bent-over grass.

“I know you’re up,” Eddie said, without looking over his shoulder.

“You should,” Roland said calmly, falling in by his side. “I was never taught much spying, and that’s where you would have such a silent creep that even a gunslinger, mayhap, wouldn’t know you were coming. I’d rather know your ears are good.”

Eddie’s face warmed at that. It felt like some kind of praise, at least a nugget of it.

“What woke you?” Roland said.

“What woke _you_?”

“Your leaving.”

“Well, excuse me, I’m sorry I robbed you of your favorite Eddie-skin blanket.” He pointed at a chain of stars. “What’s that one?” Roland had been teaching them the constellations, right after nightfall, and Eddie liked it.

“From the bright blue star there, you trace a curve.” Roland’s fingers, longer and more elegant than his, gestured; Eddie looked at what he was pointing with instead of where he was pointing. He could see the stumps the lobstrosities had left behind, but all they did was show the gracefulness of what was left. The _deftness_ of him. “It makes a loving cup. You can see the handles here and here.”

Curves around curves, like arms looped in an embrace.

Roland had started humming something, and it took Eddie a second to recognize it and a second longer than that to _believe_ it.

“‘Candy’s Room,’” Eddie said incredulously. “You’re humming Springsteen. Where the hell did you pick that up?”

Suddenly, Roland’s face was a little less luminous in the moonlight, like bars of shadow had fallen just below his eyes. It made him harder to read. “You’ve sung a number of your world’s songs for me.”

_For me_ —and he hadn’t thrown in that Susannah had sung too, in their hearing, and that she had, for that matter, a church choir voice that outclassed Eddie’s by a mile. He wandered around in pitch, and he knew it.

But yeah, he remembered it now. He _had_ sung “Candy’s Room” for Roland. Not just absently while he was skinning that night’s dinner the way Roland had taught him or while they were all bathing in one of the streams that idled through the woods. He had done it on purpose, back on the beach, when Eddie still hadn’t had the first fucking clue how much he could love him, when he’d even still sometimes hated him. He’d sung a whole rock medley for Roland then, if you could call it singing when he’d been doing it in a whisper, trying to keep Detta from having one more thing to bludgeon him with. Roland’s fever had kept spiking, and the music had helped him sleep, or at least Eddie had thought it had.

He’d figured Roland had been too out of it to know whether Eddie was singing him torch songs or pronouncing him the Emperor of Monster Beach. And he’d thought that was a good thing, too, because “Candy’s Room” wasn’t exactly a lullaby.

“I didn’t know you remembered that,” Eddie said.

“I have not forgotten.”

At this point Eddie was so used to those words being followed by _the face of my father_ that he didn’t even realize at first that Roland was finished.

_I have not forgotten the songs of my junkie boyfriend. A Time Life Collection, only $9.99._

_To get to Candy’s room you gotta walk the darkness of Candy’s hall._

He could have blown off the Roland and Eddie Basement Tapes if he’d done it a little sooner. Instead, he’d been quiet enough for long enough that he’d probably given the game away. If you couldn’t come up with the words to explain something, you gave away how trying to talk about it felt like bleeding yourself dry. He didn’t know how much Roland understood that. Eddie _wanted_ him to understand. Fill in the fucking gaps, Roland. Make the first fucking move. You’re older and smarter and you’ve got the goddamn home field advantage. _Do_ it.

But Roland wouldn’t, he understood suddenly. The dude had starved before—he’d said as much, briefly, and even if he hadn’t, Eddie could see it in in him, in the rawhide-and-bone of his body, in the way his face was just moseying back to _stark_ after having spent some time in the neighborhood of _gaunt_. Roland could live on hunger rations, on a warm body against his at nightfall. He woke up the second Eddie was gone, that was all—and he came looking for him. Maybe that was a confession too. Like remembering a song sung to him in his fever, like the tune of it was a love note, creased and folded and kept under the bed.

And maybe Eddie wasn’t the only one who was afraid Roland would walk over him to get to the Tower. Maybe Roland didn’t want to make any promises he couldn’t keep—and didn’t want to risk not being able to keep his first, big promise, the one he’d made to what he needed, not to whoever he loved. He had to get to the Tower.

_Well, I won’t stop you,_ Eddie said. He felt a sudden brightness in him, loving cup stars falling down on them. _I want to see it too, and I guess I don’t want you to be anybody else. And God only knows who you’d be without the Tower._

He smiled.

Roland said, “What is it, Eddie?”

“I was just thinking that you’d make a piss-poor accountant, if we had to be in the real world. So it’s just as well that we don’t.” He looked up at the stars again and said, in their general direction, “If you ever want to do more than just sleep, you know, we—we can.”

His skin felt hot and thin, sensitive to the slightest touch of breeze. He’d already had to get used to dealing with life and death. He’d had to take on things that mattered. _Roland_ mattered, Roland meant something, and all the old words he knew, all the dirty jokes, all the sneers—they were empty in comparison.

He felt like he needed to add something more, so he said what they’d already said before, a while back. Same song, different key. “I love you, you know.”

“I know,” Roland said quietly. “I love you too, dear. But I am a poor choice for anyone, Eddie.”

Who said anything about _choice_ , Eddie almost said, but that was a cheat.

_Dear_. The word sounded archaic and crazily beautiful in Roland’s mouth.

He didn’t want to say that poor choices were a Dean family tradition, either. Not that that wasn’t true. But he wanted something truer.

“I’m still choosing,” he said. He tried to shrug, but the moment was unshruggable. He wasn’t capable of pretending like any part of this didn’t matter. He cupped one hand against Roland’s cheek—loving cup star burning in his palm, the hottest spark electric between them—and kissed him. He felt the gentle scratch of Roland’s stubble against his skin. It was different, but it was also the first sober kiss he’d had in fucking forever, and that made it different too. He figured he liked both differences okay, and anyway, he was sharp enough. He’d figure it out. And all of this would get better when he didn’t have uncertainty cutting everything like some kind of astringent liquor, making it hard to lose himself. He looked at the little scars on Roland’s face, at his crow’s feet, at everything he knew the story of and everything he didn’t.

_Dear,_ Eddie thought, holding onto the word.

After a long second that felt like eternity, Roland kissed him back.


End file.
